Table Of ContentSlavery in the Black Sea Region, c.900–1900
Studies in Global Slavery
Series Editors
Damian Alan Pargas (Leiden University)
Jeff Fynn-Paul (Leiden University)
Editorial Board
Indrani Chatterjee (University of Texas at Austin)
William Clarence-Smith (University of London)
Pamela Crossley (Dartmouth College)
Seymour Drescher (University of Pittsburgh)
Stanley Engerman (University of Rochester)
Roquinaldo Ferreira (Brown University)
Luuk de Ligt (Leiden University)
Paul Lovejoy (York University)
Aurelia Martín Casares (University of Granada)
Ugo Nwokeji (University of California, Berkeley)
Stuart Schwartz (Yale University)
Ehud R. Toledano (Tel Aviv University)
Nigel Worden (University of Cape Town)
volume 11
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sgs
Slavery in the Black Sea
Region, c.900–1900
Forms of Unfreedom at the Intersection between
Christianity and Islam
Edited by
Felicia Roșu
leiden | boston
Cover illustration: “Tatar incursion and devastation of Poland”. Engraving by Matthaeus Merian the Elder
(1619) in: Johann Ludwig Gottfried, Historische Chronick oder Beschreibung der merckwürdigsten Geschichte,
vol. 1 (P. H. Hutter, Frankfurt, 1743), p. 599. Courtesy of Mikhail Kizilov.
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issn 2405-4585
isbn 978-90-04-47071-2 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-47089-7 (e-book)
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Contents
Preface vii
Ehud R. Toledano
Acknowledgements xvii
List of Figures and Tables xviii
Notes on Contributors xx
Introduction 1
Felicia Roșu
part 1
The Italian Phase
1 Black Sea Slavery in Genoese Notarial Sources, 13th–15th Centuries 19
Michel Balard
2 Slavery in the Black Sea Region in Venetian Notarial Sources,
14th–15th Centuries 41
Sergei Karpov
part 2
Slavery and Christianity
3 The Role of Slaves in the Byzantine Economy, 10th–11th Centuries:
Legal Aspects 63
Daphne Penna
4 Christian Slave Traders, Slave Owners, and Slaves in the
13th–15th Centuries 90
Sandra Origone
5 The Orthodox Church and the Emancipation of Gypsy Slaves in the
Romanian Principalities in the 19th Century 117
Viorel Achim
vi Contents
part 3
Raiders and Captives on the Northern Shore
6 “It Was the Poles That Gave Me Most Pain”: Polish Slaves and Captives in
the Crimea, 1475–1774 145
Mikhail Kizilov
7 How Captives Were Taken: The Making of Tatar Slaving Raids in the
Early Modern Period 187
Andrzej Gliwa
8 Cossacks as Captive-Takers in the Ottoman Black Sea Region and
Unfreedom in the Northern Countries 250
Maryna Kravets and Victor Ostapchuk
part 4
The Circassian Question
9 What Caused the 14th-Century Tatar–Circassian Shift? 339
Hannah Barker
10 Slaves of the Crimean Khan or Muslim Warriors? The Status of
Circassians in the Early Modern Period 364
Natalia Królikowska-Jedlińska
Part 5
The Black Sea and Global Slavery
11 People-Taking across the Mediterranean Maritime Frontier,
1675–1714 387
Colin Heywood
12 Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Atlantic and the Black Sea:
A Comparative View 418
Dariusz Kołodziejczyk
Index 443
Preface
Ehud R. Toledano
Each and every snowflake is unique, no one is like the other, no two ones have
exactly the same shape, goes a famous cliché, and the analogy to humans is
obviously implied. Whether this is scientifically or socially true or not, pro-
fessional historians are snowflakes people. We are trained to look for human
specificity, talk about the uniqueness of societies and the inimitability of the
human experience, which forever is bound to a specific time and space. To
historians of enslavement, enslaved individuals and enslaving societies each
developed in their own circumstances, each having their own unique charac-
teristics. What it meant to be a slave in ancient Greece or Rome, and what it
was like to legally be “owned” in the Atlantic world during the 19th century is
almost by definition, maybe even by nature, fundamentally different.
This was so until the incorporation of historical studies into the framework
of the social sciences as the 20th century reformulated our notions of how to
write history, a process that happened in the United States first, and then fol-
lowed through in Europe. Inter alia, that process raised several key questions:
who do we write for? what is the purpose of writing history? how is history
relevant to the historian’s time? and, can history be “useful”, or should it be?
From my perspective, writing the history of enslavement has to convey a clear
message about the sinister nature of human bondage and the need to fight
against it – today as in the past. Although in our post-emancipation age legal
slavery has been abolished, trafficking in humans, especially women, and the
abuse of children, persist in many parts of the globe, and tens of millions are
being deprived of their freedom and basic human rights. Hence, we cannot
escape the question: what kept enslavement alive in societies across the world
and at all times, from antiquity to this very day?
Yes, of course, there were significant differences between the way slavery
was practised in enslaving societies, but the understanding of the core phe-
nomenon of individuals and groups who continued to own other humans,
through law or practice, remains elusive. Twenty years ago, in Tokyo, I sug-
gested that there was something in human nature that made that possible.
Although from the 19th century on, value systems have come to reject enslave-
ment as an acceptable option, it took lengthy and hard-fought battles to end
slavery and suppress the slave trade. In the Atlantic world it happened less than
two centuries ago, in other parts of the world only some sixty to seventy years
ago. Whichever way we count the years, people had enslaved other people for
viii Preface
millennia, while most of humanity has enjoyed various degrees of individual
freedom for only a couple of centuries, a striking indictment of human nature
by modern and contemporary standards. But why did humans succumb to
their lamentably deficient nature? The simple answer is – because they could,
and because the moral checks on their natural inclinations failed.
Modern historians of slavery have tried for more than a century to find out
what were the actual realities in which enslaved people and their enslavers
lived, and how the mechanisms enforcing unfreedom operated in historical
societies around the world. It is in the first decades of trying to establish these
basics that they diverged, having been absorbed by the peculiarities of the
enslaving societies they were studying. Martin Klein observes that “as histori-
ans become increasingly specialized and amass more and more data on nar-
rower specialties, it becomes harder to generalize. Few of us have the breadth
to compare. Some do so in the classroom, but are cautious on the printed
page.”1 In short, they have in fact become snowflakes historians. But within few
decades, it became clear to most of them, especially from the 1950s on, that
a great deal could be gained by actually going beyond focused, specific case
studies and begin comparing slaveries. Rather than stressing how different
bondage was in each particular neck of the woods, comparative work began
to explore larger sections of the forest. Arguably, the earliest attempts to com-
pare occurred within the discourse about the Atlantic world, between the US,
Brazil, and the Caribbean.
This was generated by scholarly cooperation among historians working on
Brazil and Cuba who came to study and teach in North America, and to a lesser
extent vice versa. Such comparative work proved highly beneficial to both, but
for decades their gaze ignored the rest of the world, and to a large extent cov-
ered only the early modern and modern eras. But it was not before the 2010s
that efforts to look at slavery as a global phenomenon have come together to
produce the two volumes of the Cambridge World History of Slavery (cwhs):
volume 3 was published in 2011, and volume 4 in 2016. Historians of slavery
and the slave trade in the Atlantic world have gradually come to identify the
advantage in comparing their work with and drawing insights from what was
being done on enslavement in the Indian Ocean, western Asia, Africa, and the
Mediterranean (ancient and modern). The first attempts tended to stress the
differences, but ultimately that undertaking ushered in the third, global cycle
of enslavement studies. We are now in the stimulating and inspiring phase in
1 Martin Klein, “Global Slavery”, Review Article, Journal of Global Slavery, 1 (2016), 325–340,
especially the section “History of Slavery as World History”, 331–334 (quote at 331).
Preface ix
which we respectfully acknowledge the snowflakes, but also realize the need
to make a snowball.2
The volume before us is a reflection of the distance we have travelled, though
it is only a first step in the much-needed inclusion of that important region
into the conversation about global enslavement. As can only be expected at
such a stage, the contributions presented here are a mixture of snowflakes
and some snowballs. Felicia Roșu, whose vision and broad scholarly perspec-
tive have put together the conference on which this volume is based, men-
tions the “bewildering diversity” of the various forms of enslavement that were
practised in the Black Sea basin and argues that it “challenges the theoreti-
cal models developed so far and encourages new perspectives on global slav-
ery”. Thus, while recognizing the challenges, the current project deliberately
chooses to push forward the new opportunities to develop a global perspective
that might enrich the arsenal of insights that historians can gain from. Roșu
rightly identifies the “complex systems of unfreedom” in Ottoman and other
Muslim-majority societies as having been thus far “insufficiently integrated
into the broader discussion on slavery as a global phenomenon”.3 I would add
the potential enveloped also in the study of bondage in Africa, the Indian sub-
continent, and South East Asia to those already mentioned here.
Hence, the contribution offered by this volume is twofold. First, to open
a conversation about the intricate forms of enslavement in the regions that
stretched along the Black Sea, as over and across its waters, while at the same
time adopting a language that makes these accessible to scholars working on
other regions and searching a global perspective. At the same time, however,
we do have here the beginnings – modest and hesitant as they may be – of
opening up to the benefits of learning from other enslaving societies and
other periods of time. The key to expanding the conversation is language:
social scientists, including historians, who work on forms of legally grounded
unfreedom – and lately on practice-bound contemporary slavery – use a simi-
lar language derived from social science theory. In order to enable a mutually
beneficial dialogue between snowflake empiricists and snowball historians,
it is essential that we speak and write the same language. That language has
emerged from the older and later attempts to construct models of enslavement
that seek convergences without ignoring divergences. As Joseph C. Miller has
observed, the field of slavery studies is “increasingly truly global in range and
2 I am here echoing T. R. Darling’s line: “Every snowflake is special, until you need to make a
snowball”, in her Quiet Pine Trees (London: Unbound, 2018).
3 Felicia Roșu, Introduction, this volume, p. 5.
x Preface
framed historically”.4 So, while snowflakes must be respected, to me at least,
snowballs generate all the fun and play.
But let us carry the metaphor one step forward. To be effective in hitting
the target, snowballs need to be small enough to fit into the palm, they need
to be tight so that they do not fall apart while being thrown, and they must be
clearly seen as made up of actual snowflakes. In other words, for any model
or framework for understanding global enslavement to work for historians
we need to keep it simple, clear, minimal, without jargon-laden intricacies or
papered-over, overstretched concepts. Otherwise, those efforts will remain
unused and uninspiring: they will be dumped into the dustbin of historical
studies. Abstractions are fine, but they cannot be obfuscated and removed
from empirical realities; rather, they must be intelligible, and easy to use and
be applied to historical data.
One point I hope may enjoy broad consensus is that we need to move away
from devoting additional energy to definitions of slavery. It is true that we need
to agree about what constituted enslavement in different societies around
the globe if we want to have some common ground to work from. However,
we need also to understand that essentialist definitions are useless and easily
diverge and break up when examined in light of specific historical realities.
The concept we formulate about slavery has to be modular and flexible; it can-
not be rigid and positivist. We also have to recognize that there is a hierarchy
of historical explanations, ranging from “strong” to “soft”, and that the defini-
tions we can work with will have to be internally differentiated and graded,
with a small and hard core tapering off towards a larger and softer periphery:
there will be no binaries, but more continuums. As we modulate our notions of
what effective definitions of slavery should look like, few variables will popu-
late the core, and more variables will inhabit the diluted margins. While this
notion may seem complex, the actual product, yet again, has to be simple,
clear, and useable.
At the same time, no single-cause framework is likely to appeal to histori-
ans, who by training are programmed to prefer multi-causalities, or combina-
tions of several elements that together created and sustained global slavery.
Political economy people would push market explanations and the role of
capitalism for plantation economies (commercialized agriculture), while
social historians would argue that where enslaved people had a limited eco-
nomic role, socio-cultural factors and network analysis would help us to better
understand slaving. Nonetheless, for global enslavement we need to combine
4 Joseph C. Miller, “Appreciation and Response: Historical Paths Forward from Here”, Journal of
Global Slavery, 2 (2017), 337.
